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1) Why is it called, 'Fly Agaric'? Is that a nickname or a scientific thing?

2) Why are there so many warnings not to eat these mushrooms, saying they're deadly and stuff if they're actually magic mushrooms? I've never seen so many warnings and pages saying, 'whatever you do, don't eat these!' (even when they are pro-psilocybe). Why, if they're magic? And if they are poison, why eat them instead of the 'ones that go blue' (psilocybe mushrooms)?

3) Are they easily mis-identified or something? I see heaps of white mushrooms with red caps and white knobs - are all these proper Amanitas?

yah, barf!
they make me barf. i barf till there is nothing left to barf up. then i fall asleep.
now when i consume the odd-tasting white flesh of aminita muscaria var. formosa. i instantly get a gag reaction of nausea. its the same with pouteine. :)
id like to try a true aminita muscaria experience, but the red ones dont grow around here. just the yellow.
if i DID have some tho, i would definately throw away all the white flesh and dry out the skin, then simmer it with milk and sugar till the taste became palitable and the actual active ingredients were sufficiantly expanded enough to make it worthwhile.

(1) like forax said, these may have historically been used as an insecticide. The logic being somewhat like beer traps for slugs: the flies drink the poisoned milk, become stupefied, then fall in & drown.

(2) They CAN be fatal in extreme overdoses--just like alcohol or many OTC medications. People who have fatally OD'd have eaten a whole bunch, become comatose, then died from respiratory paralysis--typical sedative OD syndrome.

In reasonable doses (7-15g dried, maybe 5-10x that much fresh) they are an intoxicant if properly prepared. This means HEAT, which converts the ibotenic acid to muscimol and possibly neutralizes some of the muscarine. Eating them raw will surely produce nausea, vomiting, and no further effects since your stomach just said NO to the raw material. Making a (thoroughly boiled) tea from the dried caps, or cooking the fresh ones with other food (like in an omelet or soup), or baking the caps in a covered casserole till they give off their liquid, then drinking that, will produce a range of effects depending on the dose ingested.

Heavy doses (which I've never had the balls to try) can apparently produce full-scale delerium: total loss of touch with ordinary reality, delusions, and psychotic behavior. I've babysat a couple of people in this condition: it wasn't pretty & it wasn't fun.

(3) These are the easiest of all mushrooms to identify. Big bright red cap with white warts, white gills & stem, skirtlike ring on the stem under the cap, bulbous base with cottony rings of universal veil material above it--nothing else even comes close.

(4) I think I addressed that above. VERY different.

(5) Judiciously, with all the usual warnings & disclaimers. Start low & build up to find your minimum effective dosage, then decide for yourself. Some people love these, some hate them, some experience nothing at all (or just sleep), some like myself find them merely "interesting." Everyone reacts differently.

There's plenty of info out there: read all the "trip" reports at Erowid etc. before experimenting.

Actually, there are MANY different aminita species, which all look very similar. Several other aminiatas, which closely resemble the fly agaric, are some of the most deadly mushrooms in the Americas, causing a slow painful death. Usually the only way to remedy amanita poisoning is by replacing the liver, and even then sometimes it is too late. These "bad" amanitas cause a very (something like 75-80) large percentage of poisonings caused by mushrooms.

Well yes & no, Astian. All Amanitas share certain characteristics: a tall elegant stature, a skirtlike annulus (missing in a few species), white spores, and a universal veil which may leave warty or patchy remnants on the cap a a saclike or collarlike volva at the base of the (usually bulbous) stalk.

The deadly species are clustered in the phalloides and virosa/ ocreata complexes. The former have greenish to yellowish brown caps with often translucent/ striate margins; the latter are pure white. The caps are usually bald, or with only small patches of universal veil remnants Thus the yellowish and white strains of A. muscaria should be avoided due to the margin for error, even though the pattern of pyramidal warts in concentric circles usually distinguishes them.

However there are NO deadly species with blood-red to bright orange caps and white warts. These features are unique to A. muscaria. The red-capped A. caesaria of the South is typically bald, with yellow-tinted stem & gills, and is a delicious edible.

I am NOT advocating casual experimentation with any wild mushroom, including popular and esteemed edibles. Be 100% sure of your ID before eating anything, then eat only small amounts the first time. Keep some specimens back for analysis in case you get sick, since some people are allergic to commonly eaten species.

Amanitas are great. I've mostly done low to medium doses. I did one high one (half of a dried ounce, eaten), and that was the scariest experience I've ever had.

It's complete loss of reality, in every sense. Most people seem to end up thinking they are dead on really high doses, and it's quite frightening. The way it happened to me was that I kept going off on tangents in my head that I took for reality, and each time they would be longer... I kept catching myself and bringing myself back, and it wasn't long before logic struck and made me think that if this kept going, then I would realize that my whole life, starting from birth, was a made-up tangent of thought in my head.

As soon as that thought hit, I found myself in this completely black void, where I couldn't think and I just "wasn't." and all of my friends and events in my life had never taken place and never existed. I couldn't even hear or feel what was going on around me at this point; my friends were trying to wake me up, and I was kind of just laying there and mumbling from time to time. It feels *GREAT* to come back though, as you come back almost sober, and you're just glad to be alive again... It could be taken as a very mystical 'rebirth' experience, if one is inclined to think of it that way.

Medium doses are great. You'd want to be somewhere natural... Like a park or forest or beach. They give you a lot of endurance and strength, and you get visuals that are indeed different from the more common magic mushrooms. A very natural happy feeling... Like you'd wanna sit under a tree and hit the ground with a stick, or something

They are great for sleep... If you have trouble falling asleep, you can eat a very small amount and get well rested in only a couple of hours. I suggest fighting the urge to fall asleep when you trip, as it goes away if you don't succumb, but it's hard. And if you find yourself going down the bad trip "my whole life never happened" path, just try to remember that it happens to most people who eat too much. Delerium is hard to work around though...